Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who briefly ran in the Republican presidential primaries before endorsing Donald Trump, says that Republicans are at risk of losing the Senate because too many candidates are running away from Trump rather than with him.
If GOP loses Senate, it's not because candidates ran WITH @realDonaldTrump; but because they ran FROM him. No time for wimps and wusses!
— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) October 23, 2016
If Republicans lose the Senate, I suspect it won’t be because their candidates ran with Trump or away from him; it will be because Trump is so politically weak, and enough of the candidates are running in blue and purple states, that they were doomed whether they endorsed him, refused to endorse him, or first endorsed him and then rescinded their endorsements.
We have some information that bears on the plausibility of Huckabee’s theory and mine, and will soon have more.
What we already know: Trump has been polling worse than Mitt Romney at nearly every point in this race. He has polled worse in most states and significantly worse in several states than the Republican Senate candidates in those states. Several Senate candidates rescinded their endorsements only after his numbers started to sink further—and for “after,” one might as well read “because.” That point is, indeed, implicit in Huckabee’s comment. He says that the candidates who have bailed on Trump are acting like “wusses,” which means that they feared that Trump would drag them down if they stuck with him, which in turn suggests that they had a reason to be afraid of that.
I don’t have a view on whether the vote-maximizing thing for particular Republican senators to do is to continue endorsing Trump or to ditch him, and the data may never give us much help on that question. But my guess is that the results will be highly consistent with the theory that the candidate Huckabee endorsed in the primaries ended up dragging a lot of Republican Senate (and House) candidates down.